Ian G wrote: > On Friday 27 May 2005 18:02, Tony Mechelynck wrote: > > >>I get already too many emails telling me "this will earn you million >>dollars in a week", "this will let you make love all night without >>losing an erection", "get Microsoft and Symantec products at one-tenth >>the cost", even spams telling me "this will protect you from spam". If >>some spyware tells me "This will protect you from spyware", I'm not >>gonna believe it. Believe it yourself if you want, it's your funeral. > > .... > >>As P.T. Barnum said, there's a believer born every minute. > > > > I guess so. But this rules you out as Mozilla's > target "average user" so it doesn't really help. > All of us here are in the same boat - probably > not ideal target users as we are probably > sophisticated enough to avoid phishing and > the like without resort to noddy toolbars.
I'm not convinced the Mozilla Suite is fit for "the average Internet user" in the same way IE is. Faster bug-fixing also means more frequent upgrades and more "hassle". IE has a major version upgrade, how often? every three years? with a bugfix maybe every month or six? Fx has bugfix releases every few monthes, and two publicly-downloadable new binaries every day (one more-or-less "stable" and one "alpha"). Panurge's sheep don't even know they're in jeopardy, so they stick with IE and its relatively infrequent "automatic updates", period -- and they become victims of viruses, trojans and worms targeted at the slowly-fixed bugs in IE. > > Which leads me to wonder aloud whether there > is much point in Mozilla deciding that its target > user should be the average user. Practically > speaking, it seems much too tough a target to > protect these people; we can't as a community > even understand them, and we are forever > making statements that amount to denial of > their right to exist. > > iang Oh, everyone has a right to exist. However I believe more computer-literate people like us have a duty to try to "educate" their neighbours as to which behaviour patterns are "safer" qua Internet. "What everyone does" is not necessarily the best or the safest thing to do -- if it were, sticking with Bill Gates would be safest of all. Alas, there are people who never learn, people who believe every rumor, people who flock like sheep -- or lemmings -- wherever they see people going, without pausing to think about what they are doing and what are the consequences of it. I look for patterns. That Netcraft product fits too well into the pattern of spam and hoaxes for me to feel confident about its validity. When I say we have a duty to "try" to educate our neighbours, I am not saying we must "succeed" in bringing to "what we think is best". That would be too meddlesome. I think we have an obligation of means, not an obligation of result. If people are too hard-headed to listen, I don't think we should make a nuisance of ourselves to force them to change their behaviour patterns. We can do our best to explain things to them -- calmly and with respect for the person in front of us -- but we cannot force them to listen, and we mustn't try to force them to obey. Best regards, Tony. _______________________________________________ Mozilla-security mailing list [email protected] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-security
